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Carter Camp - Birds twittering in the trees are among the
few signs of life in Carter Camp, an abandoned former workers' housing compound
now overgrown with untamed grass and where hundreds of bodies are buried in an
unmarked mass grave.

Twenty years ago this week, one of the worst atrocities in
Liberia's war - a conflict that was marked by its sheer brutality and high
civilian casualties - occurred in Carter Camp when at least 600 people were
slaughtered on the night of June 5-6 1993.

The neglect shown the victims mirrors the lack of action in
bringing the perpetrators to justice. A United Nations-commissioned inquiry
found the army of the late president Samuel Doe responsible, but other accounts
have since challenged the report. No one was ever put on trial even though
Liberia's post-conflict truth commission recommended prosecution for
perpetrators of crimes in the war generally.

Nyenati Allison, who was then a reporter for The Associated
Press, visited the area soon after the carnage and described a horrible scene:
"Strewn through the camp were babies with crushed skulls, mothers hacked
by machetes, elderly people butchered like livestock."

The victims were hastily buried. A profusion of bushes now
renders the mass grave, dug between two aging trees on the outskirts of the old
camp, all but inaccessible.

"The government needs to build a memorial here so that
at least generations unborn will know what happened here," said Yelesah
Mark, a 48-year-old survivor of that hellish night as he struggled to control
his emotions.

Carter Camp existed originally as home for low-income rubber
tappers of the Firestone tire company, situated 48km southeast of Monrovia near
the world's largest rubber plantation which began operations in 1926.

Few visible things

When fighting between rival rebel forces and regional
peacekeepers displaced locals, they sought refuge in Carter Camp, swelling its
population to over 3 000. By the time of the massacre, those in the camp of mud
huts were a combination of company employees and people displaced by fighting.

The camp was immediately abandoned after the massacre and
visitors have to be told there once was a camp here. Grass has taken over
everywhere. Apart from a Nigerian-originated church which operates here, the
few visible living things are birds building nests in trees that once provided
shades for camp residents.

Mark was among the displaced people who nearly lost their
lives in the Carter Camp Massacre, one of the worst atrocities in Liberia's
14-year civil war that ended in 2003. When gunmen dressed in military uniform
entered the sprawling camp, said Mark, "we saw two tactical jeeps in which
they came taking positions at the two ends of the camp, but we did not know
their intent at first".

The slaughter soon began, with the attackers using firearms
and machetes. Over 200 of those who were butchered were children.

"My brother-in-law Bainda and my friend Sackie were
among the batch of displaced people slaughtered behind a poultry house down
there," he said. "The killings were all over the camp; as people
cried for help, all you could hear were 'ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba'" Mark said,
imitating the sound of automatic weapons fire.

"Whenever I ... tell the story to people, it brings
back that sad memory; it looks like we are digging out old wounds," he
said. "But again, the story has to be told."

Mark said those who drove into the camp and carried out the
massacre were former soldiers belonging to the army loyal to Doe. The then
president was killed in 1990, but the army he led continued to remain active,
fighting other rival forces.

Heavy gunfire

Flan J Nowon was a relief worker supervising food
distribution in Carter Camp 20 years ago. He and his team worked there hours
before the massacre, handing out food to "desperate people". They
decided to take a break and return to their homes outside the camp, planning to
return and resume the food distribution the next morning.

"It was just about two hours later that we started
hearing heavy gunfire in the camp," Nowon said, standing with AP reporters
near the overgrown mass grave. "I believed for sure there was something
terrible happening in the camp when I saw a woman who had been shot in the
buttock coming out of the camp naked, bleeding and crying and carrying a
child."

The lack of accountability for massacres such as this one
has bred suspicion that persists two decades later that some of those who
orchestrated the violence are in positions of power.

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who was a leader
of a rebel group in 1993 and whose fighters many people like Nowon suspect had
a hand in the attack, was found guilty in April 2012 in an international war
crimes court in the Netherlands of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against
humanity and received a 50-year prison sentence.

But that was for aiding and abetting rebels in neighboring Sierra
Leone, not for atrocities in his own country.

"Liberia became a place where killing was a way of
life," said Nowon. "And those who killed people deliberately in
Liberia have been left to roam the streets."

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